Dems’ anti-Trump roadblock, who politicized women’s soccer and other commentary

From the right: Dems’ Anti-Trump Roadblock

In a new CBS News/YouGov poll, 38% of respondents “said they were more concerned that the charges and indictment against [Donald] Trump are politically motivated” than about Trump’s actions themselves, and “24% said they were equally concerned by both,” reports the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.

Clearly, “many, many people see” the prosecutions against Trump “as politically motivated,” and that could be leading many of them “to discount, and perhaps ignore, the news they hear about each new Trump indictment.”

No, it doesn’t mean voters “deny any Trump culpability”; but it shows they “believe, or suspect, that an action so clearly political might have a political motive behind it.”

And “that could be enormously frustrating to those Democrats most determined to remove Trump from the American political scene.”

Eye on NY: Hochul Can Fix State’s Migrant Mess

“The only way to address” the city’s migrant crisis, argues Nicole Gelinas at City Journal, is “to reconsider the right to shelter itself — not at the city level, but at the state level.”

New York’s Court of Appeals must decide: “Does the state, under the state constitution, have an obligation to provide shelter to the entire world, or doesn’t it?”

“Governor Hochul should raise this issue herself,” because if she “doesn’t confront the problem” Empire State taxpayers “likely will end up paying for a de facto right to shelter anyway, with ‘city’ shelter residents dispersed throughout the state.”

“It’s up to the governor to ask the state’s highest court, its lawmakers, and, potentially, its voters what they believe is the state’s explicit constitutional obligation to the ‘needy.’ ”

Sports beat: Who Politicized Women’s Soccer?

Republicans are accused of “injecting politics” into the “apolitical conduct” of the US women’s national soccer team, yet for years the team has indeed been political, corrects National Review’s Noah Rothman.

Its members have served “as the avatars of a campaign to illustrate the supposed ‘pay gap’ endured by women performing the exact same roles as men.”

Team co-captain Megan Rapinoe wholeheartedly advances “divisive political causes,” and her teammates stand with her. They’ve “engaged in polarizing political debates, and that activism has had a polarizing effect.”

The left’s “Republicans pounce” charge relies on an “inversion of cause and effect,” trying to convince the public that “the GOP’s response to a controversy is more newsworthy than the controversy itself.”

Conservative: The Abuela vs. the Deplorables

You might expect a “twice-loser never-president” to “crawl away from the public eye into dignified obscurity” — but not Hillary Clinton, scoffs The American Conservative’s Micah Meadowcroft.

The woman Donald Trump allegedly “robbed the White House from has been understandably ‘preoccupied’ these last seven years” with how he won.

She worries whether we’ve “ ‘done enough to rebuild our defenses or whether our democracy is still highly vulnerable’ to a Trump election.”

Thus, her recent Atlantic essay focusing on loneliness is “a virtuosic evasion of responsibility, a ballet of blame.”

It’s all the fault of Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and Newt Gingrich, you see, and the “ ‘ultra-right-wing billionaires, propagandists, and provocateurs’ out to deceive you.”

And it’s the fault as well of all you “stupid, stupid rubes.” So now it remains: “the abuela versus the deplorables.”

White House watch: Why CIA Boss Was Elevated

The recent elevation of CIA Director William Burns to President Biden’s cabinet “portends a continuing slippage by the agency into a policymaking role,” grumble Jeremy Stern and Peter Theroux at Tablet.

Burns’ appointment shows the CIA “increasingly responsible” for delivering “a political product as a member of the president’s team.”

“The formal ban on CIA involvement in domestic affairs” has become “all but empty of significance.”

Yet after its claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, the “CIA-led intelligence community” remains “publicly compromised.”

If Biden “is in fact concerned with restoring the CIA’s credibility, he would do better to keep it outside his cabinet rather than brazenly welcoming it in.”

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board